Wednesday, June 28, 2006

sunbather, rain painting, yellow petals

A woman taxi driver is sunbathing in the narrow car park between platform No 1 and the taxi rank at Tunbridge Wells station. She has brought a sun-lounger and lies flat out on top of it. She wears a white blouse, a pair of three-quarter length trousers and sun glasses. Her white sandles are parked neatly beside the sun-lounger.

At Tate Britain, there is an exhibition of paintings by Howard Hodgkin. They are almost abstract, produced usually in swathes of bold colours, which often extend on to the frame. Sometimes bold, broad beams of dark colour seem to create a new, crude frame within the old one. Inside bright colours operate like light within a wood or tunnel. Outside the Tate, there is a long flower bed, which has been sown with various cereal crops, poppies and other wild flowers, now mostly gone to seed - an interestingly textured frame, surrounded by green, and the rest of the world. From a distance, you might be looking at a more restrained than usual Hodgkin painting.

On our black marble dining table there is a scattering of yellow petals, from a posy of garden flowers, which our guests brought for Heidi's birthday.

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About Me

Compasses

Following their Handbook for Explorers collaboration on the Compasses site (link below), Lucy Kempton and I are working together on a new venture, Questions. This is a series of poems submitted by each of us alternately, and prompted in the case of each poem by the previous poem and a new question. It is a process of adventure and discovery. Join us for the ride.http://www.compasses-lucyandjoe.blogspot.com/